


midas touch on the chevy door

by thephanlock



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment RPF
Genre: Angst, Based on a Taylor Swift Song, Friends to Lovers, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, M/M, One Shot, Pining, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28622517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thephanlock/pseuds/thephanlock
Summary: It’s almost four in the morning when Shane gets a knock on his door.Any sane person would have ignored it. Knocks on your door in the early hours of the morning never amount to anything good. But he’s unlocking the door before he thinks better of it, too tired to see the worst case scenarios laying out in front of him.“Ryan?”(Based on "champagne problems" by Taylor Swift)
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 11
Kudos: 64





	midas touch on the chevy door

**Author's Note:**

> "Your mom's ring in your pocket,  
> My picture in your wallet,  
> Your heart was glass, I dropped it,  
> Champagne problems."
> 
> -champagne problems, Taylor Swift.

It’s almost four in the morning when Shane gets a knock on his door.

Any sane person would have ignored it,  _ he _ should’ve ignored it. Knocks on your door in the early hours of the morning never amount to anything good. 

But he’s unlocking the door before he thinks better of it, too tired to see the worst case scenarios laying out in front of him.

“Ryan?” Shane says, voice still rough and scratchy from sleep. The man before him is a far cry from the Ryan that Shane knows, with a smile on his face and a punchline to every joke. 

Instead, the man before him is drenched to the bone, caught out by the first rain of the season in LA. His hood is up but it doesn’t seem to have done much good, the water seeping through, wet strands of hair falling in his face. 

He doesn’t even crack a smile at Shane’s stupid, novelty pyjamas.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” He says and Shane can’t help but notice the lines down his cheeks, trails left behind by tears. Something tells him Ryan’s been walking around for a long time.

“Come in,” Shane says, stepping to the side. Ryan does but he stops a few steps away from the doorway, looking like a lost puppy. He keeps his gaze straight ahead, lost in thought. Autopilot. “I’ll get a towel, go sit down.”

As he’s walking away, Shane hears footsteps, padding towards the living room. He doesn’t need to look back to know that Ryan’s doing as he suggested. Shane spots the newly-washed laundry, waiting to be put away, a job that he’d swore he would do tomorrow. He grabs a towel.

“What happened?” Shane asks, handing Ryan the towel and sitting beside him. 

He watches as water drops onto his couch, dripping from Ryan’s sleeve and hood and hair and  _ everything.  _ He imagines his mother throwing a fit if he did the same, batting Shane out of the room and onto the kitchen tiles, where the water can’t seep into the fabrics of the carpet. 

He knows he should care, but he doesn’t. At all.

The only thing he cares about right now is Ryan.

“I, hmph,” Ryan starts and cuts himself off almost immediately, but Shane doesn’t miss the way his voice tremors and breaks. He clears his throat. Eyes down. “She said no.”

“What?” Shane asks, the word latching onto a gasp. 

It takes a moment for his brain to catch up, to put together all the pieces. He remembers Ryan bouncing on his feet like a kid on Christmas morning, grinning wide enough to make his cheeks ache.

“I’m gonna ask her to marry me,” Ryan said, one particularly sunny morning as they were walking to the office. They’d formed a habit of walking to the coffee shop and back together before the day began.

“What,  _ now _ ?” Shane teased, only half-joking. The feeling of the coffee cup in his hands had been the only thing grounding him in that moment, taking a sip before he should have and trying not to look like his tongue was burning off. 

“No, dude,” Ryan laughed. There’s something about happiness and excitement and  _ love  _ that completely blinds you to the rest of the world. 

And that something made sure Ryan completely missed the way Shane’s face fell, that he didn’t catch the moment before Shane plastered on a smile and bumped Ryan’s shoulder with his own.

“I don’t know when but soon,” Ryan said. For a second, Shane hadn’t been convinced that Ryan had thought this through, that this was just a spur-of-the-moment idea that he’d voiced to Shane and no one else. 

But then, he pulled that little, velvet box out of his jeans pocket, a true contrast, and it hit Shane in the chest like a bullet train, a speeding force that drove straight through him, straight through his heart and leaving a clean exit wound on his back.

“What? You just carry it around with you like a loaded gun?” Shane joked because if there’s one thing he knows how to do, it’s deflect. Eyes glued on the ring, like it held its own magnetic force, Ryan closed the box and put it back in his pocket.

“Ready to fire, baby,” Giggling like a child, Ryan shot two finger guns at Shane, blew the imaginary smoke off the barrels. 

“She’s gonna love it,” Shane said and in that moment, he’d truly believed it. He could almost picture the way it would look on her finger, the engagement photos they’d take on the beach or at a dinner or abroad or, god forbid, at Disneyland or  _ wherever.  _

“I hope so.” Ryan said, voice quieter now but a smile still lingering on his words. For the second time, Shane bumped a shoulder into Ryan’s, gentle, playful.

“She  _ will,”  _ When he looked into Ryan’s eyes, he saw the flickers of doubt, hidden far behind the outpourings of joy from moments before. “I’m happy for you, man.”

And so, Shane spent the next few months preparing himself. He’d lie awake at night, imagining what he would say to Ryan when the moment finally came, what he’d comment on their joint Instagram post. 

And Shane would ignore the twisting in his chest, like two hands wrenching his heart from one shoulder to the other, until stretching turned to snapping. He’d press pause on the film reel of ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’ before it even began. He’d remove himself from the equation until it felt like Shane never existed.

He’d think of an excuse to not go to their wedding, then decide he couldn’t miss it. He’d picture what he’d wear, who he’d dance with, leaving a few hours before the party is over, as Ryan went from tipsy to too-drunk-to-realise-Shane-left. 

Never, not for one single moment, had Shane anticipated a ‘ _ no’. _

For the life of him, Shane can’t imagine anyone  _ ever  _ turning down a proposal from Ryan.

“She said no,” Ryan says. Tears overflow, spilling down his cheeks, chasing and retracing the lines they left there hours before. He wipes one away with his fingertips before it can fall past his cheekbone, but another follows too quickly after for him to catch it, overtaking and running down to his jawline.

Shane wants to go to her house and bang on the door, ask her why until he’s red in the face. She must be mad, she must be insane. But Shane’s met her, he knows she’s not. She seems like a nice girl and somehow, that’s worse. 

He wants to go and fight every single force of nature, every god he doesn’t believe in, every shift in the universe, every chain of events that lead to this moment.

But instead, he pulls Ryan towards him, arms wrapping around his back in a bone-crushing hug. Without hesitation, Ryan hugs back, leaning his head on Shane’s shoulder and Shane feels the tightening of fabric on his back, as Ryan grips his shirt.

“I’m sorry, Ry,” Shane whispers, even though he doesn’t know why, just because it feels like the right thing to say. There’s a wet patch forming on his shoulder that matches his couch, turning the light red fabric of his shirt a dark crimson.

It feels like he should say more but the words won’t quite pull into sentences, so he stays silent, rubbing a circle on Ryan’s back. He’s not sure how long passes before Ryan speaks again.

“She said we weren’t right,” Ryan says, muffled against Shane’s shoulder. He pulls back, untangles himself from Shane and looks him in the eyes and Shane feels his heart snap in half. To see all that joy and excitement in his eyes be replaced by pain and regret. “She said she’s been trying to break up with me for a while.”

And Shane doesn’t know what to say to that. What he’s supposed to say, what the right things are to smooth over the rough edges. He knows he’s supposed to coo and sigh and promise everything will be okay, but Shane can’t bring himself to utter those words. 

“Absolute bullshit,” He decides on, but it’s enough of a surprise to Ryan that the tears cease. Shane thinks, if he looks hard enough, he could even see the whisper of a smile starting to form, purely from the absurdity of his words.

“Right,” Ryan says, disbelieving, a wet chuckle. Before he can think better of it, Shane’s wiping away the remainders of tears on Ryan’s cheeks with his thumb. One hand on the side of his face, lingering, so careful, as though he’s holding a precious diamond, scared to drop it. 

Just for a moment, before he lets his hand fall back to where it lay before, in his lap.

The sentence tumbles out of his mouth before he has the chance to stop it.

“Anyone that wants to break up with you is out of their mind,” He says, then abruptly clamps his mouth shut because that’s quite  _ enough _ . It’s fine to think it, but he shouldn’t have said it, it’s too close to revealing everything and he can’t do that, especially not  _ now,  _ when Ryan sits on his couch, a puddle of tears and shattered dreams.

And okay, maybe Shane’s spiralling.

“You think so?” Ryan whispers, a glimmer of hope crossing his features in what seemed like a hopeless night. 

“Yeah, man,” Shane says, takes a deep breath and forces himself to look Ryan in the eyes, just to make sure he knows he’s telling the truth, to make sure he believes it. “Any girl would be lucky to have you, they’re practically lining up round the block. Bet they’ll even let you talk to them about basketball for three hours straight.”

They let out a laugh at the same time, synchronised and unintentional, and the noise overlaps one another, seeming to reverberate in the silence of Shane’s apartment. A momentary reprieve. 

There’s a pause, a beat, where neither of them move. And Shane can’t help but just watch Ryan, like he thinks he’ll vanish if he looks away. He tries not to let the concern show on his face but can’t help when his eyebrows furrow, giving him away.

And Ryan. Looking at him like he’s done something magical, even though Shane’s inclined to argue he’s done nothing special, nothing but be there for a friend, nothing but the bare minimum. 

But then, before Shane can even realise what’s happening, Ryan presses his lips against Shane’s. A hand at the nape of his neck. Tentative, gentle. 

Heart throbbing in his chest, so loud that the beating echoes in his head, pounding so that Shane can actually count out each individual beat. It’s like a kick drum layered into a song, hidden but once he focuses on it, it’s all he can hear, racing and unavoidable. He wills it to slow and hopes Ryan can’t hear it.

And for a moment, Shane kisses back. For a moment, he forgets the whole thing, like his mind is a slate that’s been wiped clean. But the crash back to reality sends him pulling back, like snapping out of a daydream haze to realise you’re running terribly late, like a bucket of ice water has been dunked over his head.

“ _ Ryan,”  _ Shane says, forcing himself to push Ryan away because not now, not like this. And the instant Ryan looks at him, he’s glad he did. It’s kinda like looking at a kicked puppy, all sad eyes and pulled heartstrings. He thinks he’d give anything, trade  _ anything,  _ just to make sure this look is never on Ryan’s face again. 

Ryan lets out a choked sound and Shane can see the tears about to fall again. He puts everything aside, packs it into a box to check back on either later or never, kicks it to the back of his mind. One tug and he pulls Ryan back into a hug, accepting that this shirt will probably be tear-stained beyond belief and still not caring.

“It’s okay,” Shane hushes, as he feels the sobs racking Ryan’s body, so quiet that Shane can barely hear them. He cards his fingers through Ryan’s hair, something that always calmed Shane when he was upset and tries not to think too hard. 

There must be a hole in the back of Ryan’s shirt, worn down by the sheer amount of times Shane has traced the same circle there, rubbing back and forth and hoping it brings some kind of comfort.

“It’s okay.” Shane whispers, a mantra. It’s weak but it’s all he knows, the only words his brain is supplying him with. He holds Ryan a little tighter and hopes that if he holds tight enough, he can put the broken shards back together. A shattered wine glass, glued back together piece by piece.

One day at a time.

**Author's Note:**

> i kinda hate this but here you go anyway, hope you enjoy it<3


End file.
